Over in New York’s Central Park the curtain came down last week on The Public Theater’s
controversial production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.
Controversial because the actor playing the assassinated Caesar looked
and sounded like Dumbass Trump, right down to the overlong red necktie
and clownish orange-blond nimbus of hair.
But the curtain didn’t fall because of the outrage that came
tumbling from the right — including protesters heckling at a couple of
the performances and death threats directed at the production’s director
(not to mention feverish tweets and emails from confused trolls hurled
at any theatre company with the word “Shakespeare” in its name).
Nor did it occur because two of The Public Theatre’s corporate donors, Bank of America and Delta Air Lines, pulled their sponsorship of the show,
a gutless move of appeasement from two businesses, banking and air
travel, so well known these days for their dazzling records of customer
satisfaction. (Another company, American Express, didn’t yank its cash
from The Public but tweeted that its money doesn’t fund Shakespeare in
the Park “nor do we condone the interpretation of the Julius Caesar play.”)
No, the fact is, Julius Caesar always was scheduled
to end the night that it did. That was to make way for the summer’s
second Shakespeare in the Park production — A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Gentle readers will recall that this is the Shakespeare play
in which, among a great many other things, a knavish sprite named Puck
turns a man into an ass. Such an act once seemed like magic, but given
today’s political climate, the turning of men into asses has become the
rule rather than the exception.
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